‘-and then we eat the mules,’ he said. ‘I know.’
But he was as good as his word, and by the next halt, every woman was mounted on a spare horse. Including Kaitlin de Towbray, who had womanfully walked with her pregnant belly all the way up the east side of the mountains.
They didn’t stop at dark.
The Red Knight was seen to have a hurried conference with Ser Gelfred; fires were lit, and food cooked – or rather, cold food was eaten and hot tea, or just hot water, drunk in enormous quantities. And then they marched again.
Immediately after leaving their fires, the army started going down. They had been up and down the ridges for three days, but now they descended steadily, and the icy track, cleared by the exhausted Nordikans, became a two-rut track with less snow, and then a snow-covered stone roadbed.
An hour before dawn, when Mag was a jumble of old joints, nerves, lack of food and lack of sleep, they turned a long curve on a spur that stuck out from a mountainside – and every man and woman who came to the edge gave a gasp.
On their right side, a cliff fell away. The road continued, with enormous stone arches, buttresses in still more stone, cascading down the hillside like a waterfall frozen in rock, but the cliff was half a thousand feet high and the stream at the bottom was so far down in the darkness as to be lost except for the echoing thunder of its icy passage.
The cliff was imposing, but it was the sight of twinkling lights like distant faery folk that raised the shouts. Somewhere – somewhere within reach, at last – there was light, and warmth.
Aeskepiles looked at the stumps of the ice bridge abutments and cursed.
‘How strong is he?’ he asked aloud. And after a small ritual of gathering, he built a single bridge.
Demetrius pointed his sword. ‘He made three,’ he said.
‘I must conserve my power,’ Aeskepiles said. ‘If he squanders his, all the better.’
Amphipolis was the name of the town, and her gates were stormed. The veterans of the company offered no warning and no formal summons to surrender – and the town had no idea that an enemy army was above them in the mountains. The veterans put ladders against the low curtain walls before sunrise, just as if they’d been in Arles. Fifty Thrakian soldiers died very quickly on the wrong side of the main gate, tricked, trapped, and annihilated. Ser Jehan didn’t bother taking prisoners.
Father Arnaud and Gelfred sat on their horses in the central square and shouted at the Red Knight until they were joined by the Emperor, and together with a hundred men-at-arms he led them to clear the archers – the victorious archers – out of the streets.
‘If you let this town be destroyed, you are no knight,’ Father Arnaud said.
The Red Knight leaned over and vomited in the snow.
‘Is he drunk?’ Arnaud cried.
Toby shook his head.
Ser Michael grabbed the priest’s bridle. ‘He’s tired. And this, pardon me, padre, is war.’
‘We don’t make war like this on the Wild!’ Father Arnaud said.
‘The Wild doesn’t have silver candelabra or handsome girls,’ the Red Knight muttered. ‘Damn you and your moral certainty. We are not fucking paladins. We are soldiers, and this town is an enemy town taken by storm. These men are cold, and exhausted, and an hour ago they had almost no hope of warmth.’ He pointed as John le Bailli kicked in a door and led three armoured men in emptying the cowering family and their servants out into the snow. Then a dozen of the company’s women took the house.
While they watched that drama, Ser Bescanon dragged Wilful Murder out of a building while a dozen other men with leather buckets tried to put out the fire he’d started.
‘This is senseless. If I cannot appeal to God, I’ll appeal to your basic humanity,’ Father Arnaud said.
‘Who says I have any humanity at all?’ the Red Knight shouted in the priest’s face. ‘You want me to save the world, and you don’t want any innocents killed? It doesn’t work like that. War kills. Now get out of my way, because I have tomorrow’s atrocities to plan!’
Toby waited until his lord was gone into what had been the mayor’s house.
‘He’s not doing all that well,’ he said. ‘He’s sick, and he’s worried. In case you gentleman can’t tell. You’re all very helpful, I’m sure.’ He shrugged, seized an apple from a basket that a looter ran past carrying, and took a bite. Then he followed his lord inside.
After a warm night and a lot of stolen food, the army marched again at dawn.
The town, stripped of preserved food, pack animals, and grain, watched them go in surly silence. Even the presence of their Emperor could not make them cheer.
‘If you ever come to rule Thrake, that town will belong to you,’ Father Arnaud said, as they rode west.
‘Then I’ll do something nice for them. Father, I am aware that you are a good man, and, despite appearances, I like to think of myself as a good man. In fact, I pride myself on it. We are, if you will pardon me, in a situation that cannot be resolved by prayer or a noble cavalry charge. So could you, perhaps, leave me alone?’
Father Arnaud smiled savagely ‘Never, Gabriel. I will never, ever leave you alone.’
The Red Knight put his hand to his head, which throbbed as if he had spent several nights drinking.
The army marched west, moving as fast as two thousand tired soldiers and their women and baggage animals could manage.
‘You swore he wouldn’t make it across the Penults,’ Aeskepiles said quietly.
Demetrius was looking down at the town below him.
‘Now his army is between us and Lonika,’ Aeskepiles went on. ‘How much of a garrison does your capital have?’
Demetrius chewed on his thumb. He worked on the callus, biting it, chewing the bits. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he said.
‘We have to catch him in the plains,’ Dariusz offered. ‘The road will be clear, and good.’
Ser Christos shook his helmeted head. ‘We’re haemorrhaging men.’
‘So is he,’ Demetrius said. They’d picked up a dozen city stradiotes who’d simply surrendered as soon as they could. They’d already captured almost a hundred stragglers.
Ser Christos let out a long, harsh breath, but said nothing.
‘Advance the banner,’ Demetrius said. ‘Get the scouts well out. Put all the Easterners out. Let us make the usurper’s life a living hell.’
Chapter Eighteen
Harndon – The Queen
Four days after Christmas, three ships came sailing in to Harndon port. On board was Ser Gerald Random, and he brought the entire Morean fur trade with him, minus only his concessions to the Etruscan merchants, as well as fifteen tons of Wild honey. The Etruscan banks in the city received into their coffers some thousands of leopards in loans, and trading – gambling, some called it – in the value of some elite commodities changed tenor rapidly.
Ser Gerald was seen to go to the palace and place in the King’s hands a quantity of pelts, honey, and gold.
In the great marketplace at Smithfield, outside the western gates of the city, workmen began to construct the scaffolding for a truly titanic set of lists, including bleachers for seats. Loads of lumber came downriver, the great logs simply heaved in and floated down the Albin from the edge of the Wild.
Ser Gerald’s furs were sold for good quantities of silver – many to Harndon’s Etruscan merchants, who paid a higher price but no doubt had ways of passing the cost onto their customers. But the flow of silver was steady, and, just as the first warmth of spring melts the snow and causes the frozen streams to develop to a trickle, so the silver began to flow into the King’s new mint, which bore a startling resemblance to Master Pye’s work yard.
The dies were ready, and Edmund began striking slugs of silver as soon as the first shipment reached him. Outside Master Pye’s gate, a full company of the Harndon trained men stood guard, less proud now in their half armour than they had been on Christmas night. Keeping a hundred apprentices and journeymen ‘idle’ so that they could play soldier in winter was expensive and boring and cold.